Previous  - next

broad-shouldered man with a curly beard, who, without taking off
his sheepskin cap, was running lightly and rapidly up the worn
steps of the stone staircase. One of the members going down--a
lean official with a portfolio--stood out of his way and looked
disapprovingly at the legs of the stranger, then glanced
inquiringly at Oblonsky.

Stepan Arkadyevitch was standing at the top of the stairs. His
good-naturedly beaming face above the embroidered collar of his
uniform beamed more than ever when he recognized the man coming
up.

"Why, it's actually you, Levin, at last!" he said with a friendly
mocking smile, scanning Levin as he approached. "How is it you
have deigned to look me up in this den?" said Stepan
Arkadyevitch, and not content with shaking hands, he kissed his
friend. "Have you been here long?"

"I have just come, and very much wanted to see you," said Levin,
looking shyly and at the same time angrily and uneasily around.

"Well, let's go into my room," said Stepan Arkadyevitch, who knew
his friend's sensitive and irritable shyness, and, taking his
arm, he drew him along, as though guiding him through dangers.

Stepan Arkadyevitch was on familiar terms with almost all his
acquaintances, and called almost all of them by their Christian
names: old men of sixty, boys of twenty, actors, ministers,
merchants, and adjutant-generals, so that many of his intimate
chums were to be found at the extreme ends of the social ladder,
and would have been very much surprised to learn that they had,
through the medium of Oblonsky, something in common. He was the
familiar friend of everyone with whom he took a glass of
champagne, and he took a glass of champagne with everyone, and
when in consequence he met any of his disreputable chums, as he
used in joke to call many of his friends, in the presence of his
subordinates, he well knew how, with his characteristic tact, to
diminish the disagreeable impression made on them. Levin was
not a disreputable chum, but Oblonsky, with his ready tact, felt
that Levin fancied he might not care to show his intimacy with
him before his subordinates, and so he made haste to take him off
into his room.

Levin was almost of the same age as Oblonsky; their intimacy did
not rest merely on champagne. Levin had been the friend and
companion of his early youth. They were fond of one another in
spite of the difference of their characters and tastes, as
friends are fond of one another who have been together in early
youth. But in spite of this, each of them--as is often the way
with men who have selected careers of different kinds--though in
discussion he would even justify the other's career, in his heart
despised it. It seemed to each of them that the life he led
himself was the only real life, and the life led by his friend
was a mere phantasm. Oblonsky could not restrain a slight
mocking smile at the sight of Levin. How often he had seen him
come up to Moscow from the country where he was doing something,
but what precisely Stepan Arkadyevitch could never quite make

Previous  - next